Plants

Types of currants fall into a few color groups, red, white, pink and black, along with a number of wild species that are seldom seen in gardens. Currants are small, round berries borne in hanging clusters on thornless shrubs, which is the easiest way to tell them from their close relatives, the gooseberries. More than … Read more

Butterflies want something genuinely different from a flower than either bees or hummingbirds do. A hummingbird hovers and probes a narrow tube with its bill, and a bee crawls into a flower’s interior chasing pollen, but a butterfly needs somewhere to actually land, which is exactly why flat-topped or clustered composite flowers, the coneflowers, zinnias, … Read more

Hummingbirds and bees are drawn to almost opposite sets of traits, which turns out to be a genuinely useful fact for anyone designing a yard around one or the other. A hummingbird sees red vividly, has essentially no sense of smell to speak of, and carries a long, thin bill and tongue built specifically for … Read more

Most classic flowering shrubs, lilac, forsythia, azalea, spirea in its older forms, put on one genuinely spectacular show and then go quiet for the rest of the year. That single-flush pattern is simply how they evolved, timing a burst of energy into one concentrated spring bloom rather than spreading it out. A shrub that blooms … Read more

No flower is completely bee-proof, and it’s worth saying that honestly before recommending a single one. Bees are opportunistic foragers, and a hungry bee will occasionally investigate almost anything blooming nearby. What actually varies is how attractive a flower is relative to its neighbors, and a handful of genuine, well-documented traits reliably push a flower … Read more

Evergreen shrubs do most of the structural work in a landscape, holding a garden’s shape and color through the exact months when everything deciduous has gone bare. That year-round presence makes the category genuinely broad, spanning needled conifers built for cold climates, broadleaf evergreens suited to milder, wetter regions, and a handful of desert and … Read more

Low maintenance means something genuinely different from drought tolerant, even though the 2 categories overlap more than people expect. A low-maintenance shrub is one that doesn’t need constant pruning to hold its shape, doesn’t attract the pests and diseases that turn into a season-long spraying project, and doesn’t drop messy fruit or require the kind … Read more

Drought tolerance in a shrub usually comes down to one of a few strategies: a deep taproot that reaches moisture other roots can’t, small or silvery leaves that reduce water loss, or genuine dormancy that lets a plant simply shut down and wait out a dry season rather than fight it. Shrubs native to the … Read more

Florida lawns live under a different set of rules than lawns almost anywhere else in the country. The combination of sandy soil, intense heat, heavy summer rain, and a frost-free (or nearly frost-free) growing season for most of the state rules out the cool-season grasses that dominate lawns up north. Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass … Read more

Elevation decides more about a Colorado lawn than almost anything else. It’s not really about which town you live in, it’s about how high up and how dry that spot actually is. The native, low-water grasses that make so much sense along the Front Range simply stop being an option once you’re much above 6,500 … Read more